I’ve tested dozens of meal kits — here’s why Home Chef stands out

Home Chef meal selection

Home Chef minimizes the hassle of meal planning. When signing up, you take a quiz about what kinds of meals you’re interested in, including sub-30-minute recipes, “culinary” dishes with premium ingredients, microwaveable meals, family-friendly dinners, or oven-ready kits that you simply assemble in a provided tin.

You can also select preferences, such as “protein-packed” or “gluten-smart” (and if you want to avoid any particular ingredients, like peanuts). The site then recommends a menu you’re likely to enjoy, but allows you to swap in any of the other options — 35 are offered weekly. You can also double up the protein or customize meals by ordering chicken instead of salmon, for instance.

Unlike other services that lock you into a set plan, each week you can choose between two and six recipes, and two, four, or six servings, so you can cook more or less based on what your schedule looks like that week.

I also liked that you can see the full instructions for a recipe before selecting a meal, so you know exactly what you’re going to get — a perk that not every meal kit service offers. Additionally, those instructions include helpful details like difficulty level, how spicy a dish will be, and how many days after delivery you should cook the dish. I found this simple info takes a ton of the guesswork out of the experience: You know exactly what you’re in for before you even add a meal to your cart.

That said, one dish I got that was marked “expert” really wasn’t all that difficult. There was just one step — slicing a chicken in half lengthwise so you could stuff cheese inside — that required some extra concentration, and the recipe gave a shortcut option to skip it if I wanted.

Another unique bonus: Your first Home Chef box comes with a three-ring binder that makes it easy to keep the recipe cards organized, plus helpful info on how to make the most of the service, like cooking tools you’ll generally need and how to recycle the packaging.

Home Chef recipes

The process of cooking the recipes was surprisingly easy. The recipes weren’t overly fussy, and the instructions were clear with helpful tips and reference photos. The kits included every ingredient I needed except oil, salt, and pepper — one even gave me the precise amount of butter the recipe called for. Plus, they actually took the amount of time they said they would: A feta-stuffed za’atar chicken dish that gave me a 40- to 50-minute estimate was ready in 49 minutes.

The cleanup was pretty painless. One oven-ready dish I tried used (provided) aluminum tins that I could recycle when I was done — the only thing I needed to clean was one non-stick pan and a mixing bowl.

If you’re looking for the most painless meal kit, Home Chef offers several heat-and-eat microwaveable meals each week. Or, you can skip cooking entirely and sign up for its Tempo plan of chef-crafted, dietitian-approved dishes that you microwave or heat up in the oven. While these meals look a bit like 90s airplane food and the portions are pretty modest, I found some of them surprisingly tasty. (The pork carnitas rice bowl was a favorite.)

The regular Home Chef dishes, however, were not restaurant-quality meals I’d want to make over and over again. My husband and I both gave them all about a four out of five on taste. We did, however, appreciate that the portion sizes were spot-on, leaving us full but without extra food left over. I also liked that each meal had a healthy mix of carbs, protein, and veggies to make a well-balanced meal, so even when we didn’t love the dish, I at least felt like we were eating something nutritious.